3D force control for robotic-assisted beating heart surgery based on viscoelastic tissue model

Current cardiac surgery faces the challenging problem of heart beating motion even with the help of mechanical stabilizer which makes delicate operation on the heart surface difficult. Motion compensation methods for robotic-assisted beating heart surgery have been proposed recently in literature, but research on force control for such kind of surgery has hardly been reported. Moreover, the viscoelasticity property of the interaction between organ tissue and robotic instrument further complicates the force control design which is much easier in other applications by assuming the interaction model to be elastic (industry, stiff object manipulation, etc.). In this work, we present a three-dimensional force control method for robotic-assisted beating heart surgery taking into consideration of the viscoelastic interaction property. Performance studies based on our D2M2 robot and 3D heart beating motion information obtained through Da Vinci™ system are provided.